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How to make art (and be happy) in 2018 – my 2005 art manifesto

You can’t really be an artist without having a manifesto, can you? Well, you can, of course, but being trained as an artist in a higher education institution usually involves reasoning why you are making art, and reading the manifestos of other artists. It is quite likely you come up with your own, or several ones over time.

I wrote/painted my art manifesto in March and April 2005. It consists of nine works of 50 by 65 centimetres, as reproduced in this blog post. I created them almost a year after finishing my postgraduate studies in Fine Art.

My art manifesto was significant to me. Though only relevant in my own small context, I was hoping to speak to a wider (future) public of my work. Doing so gave me a feeling of control, very much welcomed in the precarious conditions in which I worked and lived.

My desire to change reality, including my own core being, still strikes me as the key message of my manifesto. The deep longing to be someone else (someone without my baggage) in a different world (a world that is not sexist, racist and homophobic) has always been the starting-point for my art.

At the time, my art manifesto gave the context to the artistic project I had started called A Room with a Lesbian View, for which I drew, painted and photographed the view from my apartment in Leiden for more than ten years. My art manifesto can be seen as the expression of a queer-feminist strategy, balancing between addressing both a general art public and a queer/feminist counterpublic. I later read about this in Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics for my PhD thesis on art, transdisciplinarity and social change.

When I now read and look at my 2005 art manifesto, I see how crucial the words I wrote were for finding my solutions, and, eventually, my happiness (in London) and my work pleasure (at the Government Equalities Office). And, the journey continues: I have not stopped making art – even though some people may think so!